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After being forced out of its longtime Menlo Park home last year, Shiok! Singapore Kitchen has found its way back. The restaurant has reopened in a new space on Oak Grove Avenue with the same kitchen staff dishing up the same family recipes.
Since 1999, Shiok! served traditional Singaporean dishes out of its space at 1137 Chestnut St., co-owner Dennis Lim said. The restaurant was started by Lim’s sister, who moved from Singapore after marrying an American and began cooking the food she grew up with for friends at home before opening a small restaurant in San Carlos. When it outgrew that space after only six months, she and their mother moved the business to Menlo Park, eventually calling Lim, then living in Micronesia, to take over about 13 years ago.
But when the Chestnut Street building was sold, Shiok!, along with other tenants, including Gerry’s Cakes, was forced to leave by the new owner by Jan. 1, 2025. Lim said he looked for a new location to avoid laying off staff but struggled to find one that fit his needs.
“I drove up and down the Peninsula, but we really wanted to come back to Menlo Park, because of the community,” Lim said. “My customers are like family. I watch kids here grow up, go to college, and then come back. I’ll see my regulars every month or even two or three times a month.”
Since the closure, Shiok! has been operating as a delivery and takeout restaurant from a “ghost kitchen” in Redwood City, but Lim said the experience was not the same.
“You don’t have the same connection with customers,” Lim said. “Cooking, people eating your food, it’s very personal to us. If it’s just faceless through a screen, it feels different.”
Now Shiok! has reopened at 625 Oak Grove Ave., the former location of Lotus Restaurant.
“We don’t want to think of it as like a new opening. We want to think of it as we’re coming back to the community,” Lim said. “It’s always been about the community, the people coming in, introducing them to the flavors.”
Lim said customers can expect to see a lot of familiar faces at the new space. The entire kitchen staff is the same as before they closed and several of the servers are returning.
The reopening has been a community effort. With limited funds after losing the previous space and having to pay moving expenses, Lim said his family is doing much of the renovation work themselves. His brother-in-law handled carpentry, his sister worked on the gardening and his wife helped build the seating. Customers have volunteered time and donated items to help get the new dining room ready, he added.
Singaporean cuisine is unique because it blends food from across Asia, Lim said. He describes it as “the original fusion cuisine,” shaped over generations.
“Because Singapore is a small island, we adopt culture and food from all of the different ethnicities that live there,” Lim said. He added that customers will see influences from Chinese, Indian, Malay, Indonesian, Thai and European cooking on the menu.
For first-time customers, Lim recommends ordering across those traditions rather than sticking to a single flavor profile.
Just down the street, the former Chestnut Street building where Shiok! once operated sits, boarded up.
“We’re just wondering why, why is it vacant? We could have been there for a year,” he said, adding that neighboring businesses with decades-long tenures were also kicked out.
Shiok! is open in its new location Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. for lunch and 5-8 p.m. for dinner Tuesday through Sunday.
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